Rage Against the Dying of the Light
by warheart
Summary: Edward Masen is ready to die. When Carlisle saves him, Edward regrets the choice of being turned immortal. When he meets Bella, he makes another decision that will haunt him for the rest of eternity. AU, mature.
1. Prologue

The monster had been sleeping for years. No longer awake, he was no longer tempted. It was not being placated that made him dormant, but rather the consistent suppression of his urges which shut him down for decades.

This monster was inside of me, and I was his keeper. I was the one who ascertained he was forbidden from tasting that which he had consistently craved for years. It was difficult work, though I was good at denying him what he so desperately wanted.

But even the most careful of us can make mistakes.


	2. The Sickness

I was not afraid of death.

As soon as I had become of age, I wanted to fight for my country in the war. My mother, of course, was horrified by the idea from the very beginning. She was afraid of losing me, but couldn't vocalize her fear. My father was so full of pride over his son's patriotic heart that she couldn't bear to tell him her worst fears were being realized. Although other boys my age would be enlisting with me, their mothers seemed to be as unaffected as my own father. The tears in their eyes were not from anticipating loss, but rather from anticipating the glory that their little boys would bring to the great nation. She suffered in silence, but I knew.

I knew from the way she found small excuses to be as close to me as possible. She would fuss over my clothes as we talked, looking for an excuse to brush my skin and feel the warmth of me, so alive and present, worried that she wouldn't be able to reach out to me for much longer. I was the baby boy who had grown into a man whom she had no control over, and it scared her. She loved me so much that sometimes I believed I could hear her thoughts; hear the way she sometimes believed she would be suffocated by the way her heart beat for me, her lovely boy with her own lovely emerald eyes.

In the end, I was the one who lost her. When the influenza came, it was fast. My friends started dying, first one, and then by the dozens. Death was all around me, and I became accustomed to the fact that I would probably be going in a short time. When my father became sick I prayed only for a quick and merciful death for him, because I knew if I prayed for him to stay alive he would suffer, choking on every breath he breathed.

After he died, my mother clung to me even more fiercely, until the sickness came for her too. Greedy and selfish, I begged for her life; begged for my dear mother with my eyes to stay alive for me because I didn't want to lose her. I couldn't bear to lose her. The doctor told me there was nothing he could do. I was wary of him, the doctor who came only at night, when the moans of the dying were loudest. Surely he was too young to know anything; he only looked a few years older than me, at my tender seventeen years. I felt something around him, a sort of trepidation that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I felt silly, but I never turned my back to him. I wondered how he hadn't succumbed to this pestilence in the air; how he could be surrounded by it and never contract it. I didn't trust him.

My mother did. She would talk to him every night when he came in to tally the dead and provide the last earthly comforts to the dying. His hands often lingered on her face, her neck, and I was outraged by the indecency of this creature, how he could even think of using a dying widow for some twisted sense of pleasure. But when he had left before the morning, my mother spoke only of the kind, handsome young doctor with the cool hands that had soothed away the burning fever from her skin.

It was not long before I felt the ache in my chest and the weakness in my once strong limbs. I waited for death in the starched bed of the fever ward. I was not anxious to die because I did not have hope for a cure. Dying was my only option, and so I embraced it. My mother begged me to fight for my life as I had begged her to fight for her own, but I could tell she did not really believe she would live. I knew what she was thinking- _Dear Lord, do not take my son before you take me. I do not have the strength. _She held my hand and whispered to me from her bed, soothing words meant for small children with bumps and scratches, the kind of things that healed. She believed I would heal from this too.

On the day of her death my mother was quiet. She gripped my hand all day and into the night, until the kind doctor returned. She squeezed my hand, and told me she loved me. Then she turned to the doctor and said, "Save him. You must do everything in _your _power to save him." She slipped quietly into darkness. Feeling her limp hand in mine, I wished for death to come and take me to her.

Instead, the doctor took me away. He picked me up, swinging me into his arms much too easily. He was frigid to the touch, and his skin did not give. My own flesh curled around his form as he hurried me, much too quickly, through vacant hallways and stairwells, until he sped out of the hospital into the windy night. Through the shadowy streets he ran, too quickly for me to comprehend the blurs in front of my eyes. I moaned, and he stopped at once while I vomited on the street, before running again. It was unreal, what was happening, but I thought perhaps this man was an angel in disguise, preparing to grant me my last wish.

He finally stopped running- flying?- and he cradled me in front of a wrought iron gate. The gate guarded a palatial house on the lake. There were no lamps lit in the windows. In fact, the house seemed devoid of life. The doctor kicked the gate in the middle of the two parts, which buckled with a hideous screech, and he took me through. Upstairs, he placed me on a bed thick with down throws and pillows, and lit a lamp.

Before, in the dark of the hospital, I had never noticed his eyes. Every cell in my body screamed for me to run, run away from this thing which could not possibly be a man, because the coldness of his skin, his speed and unbelievable strength, and his _eyes. _The peculiar gold colour burned unlike any other thing I'd ever seen. It frightened me, but there was no violence in those eyes. Only pity and fear.

Why would _he_ be afraid of _me_?

"Edward?" his soft voice questioned. "Can you hear me?"

I moaned piteously in response. I was too bewildered by this creature to speak. Why had my mother wanted him, this impossible being, to take me away? But then I realized she couldn't possibly have known all these things about him.

Or had she?

"Edward. Edward, your mother... she wants me to save you." He looked so troubled. "I can save you if you'll let me."

I did not want to be saved. I wanted to slip away, fade into the darkness and rot away from the ruined, infectious city and this strange man. I wanted to be with my dead parents forever. If I could not have my glory in the war, if I could not be the strong young man that I was before, if I could not have my parents again, then why would I want to live? I had accepted death. I was ready for it to take me, because there was no other option.

Who was this man to think he could make things otherwise? But then again, he had so many secrets. Perhaps he knew how to make me well again, to live as I had before. My parents were dead, but my mother had asked me to fight for my life. I could not bear to think of my mother's last wish, spent on me, being wished in vain.

And so I turned to the doctor, and nodded.


End file.
